This is just a question and an answer from a very interesting conversation between our endeared author, Amitava Kumar and Ben Sandman. You, I bet, are going to like it as there are quite close echoes of things we see around. Ben Sandman : Many people, you say, attribute the recent increase in nonfiction writing to the “public’s hunger for truth.” It’s a line of thinking with which you disagree. You write: “There is no truth in nonfiction; there is only perspective.” If you don’t buy this narrative about truth, how do you explain the rise of nonfiction in recent years? Amitava Kumar : Yes, David Shields calls it “reality hunger.” I don’t know why nonfiction is more popular these days. Perhaps because all the work that the novel used to do is now being done by popular media. Earlier, the report on social space as well as a look at the interior life was to be found in novels. Now you just put on the TV. One person is spilling their guts out on one channel. On another channel, a talking head is explaining everything in soundbites. What are you going to do? Anna Karenina has just come out of rehab. She shows up on Oprah. As a writer, you try to score the book deal which will tell Anna’s story in 300 pages. In that note in Rats, the one that you are referring to, I wanted to make the point that nonfiction is also fiction. The world is accessed through language. What is real is visible to us only when seen through the literary lens. Style, whether in fiction or nonfiction, is always, always, always, the curry in which the goat gets cooked. You can read it in full here : full-stop.net/2014/10/21/interviews/bensandman/amitava-kumar/
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 08:44:54 +0000
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